


For This, And Everything Else

by sariagray



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen, Other, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-29
Updated: 2012-03-29
Packaged: 2017-11-02 16:02:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/370811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sariagray/pseuds/sariagray
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock has gone through almost a whole packet of cigarettes, the purest he could find to buy amidst mounds of mentholated and mild, in less than twelve hours.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For This, And Everything Else

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by eldarwannabe.

Sherlock has gone through almost a whole packet of cigarettes, the purest he could find to buy amidst mounds of mentholated and mild, in less than twelve hours. He keeps a crystal ashtray, art deco square and heavy, on the floor and it spills over with ash and yellowed filters onto yesterday’s evening paper. It’s a fire hazard, absolutely, and part of John twitches every time Sherlock bends close to it in his dressing gown, but he’s grown accustomed to the dangers of sharing this flat, of spending copious amounts of time in the vicinity of Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock hasn’t smoked much of the batch, though, opting instead to light each cigarette with a pull from his lips and letting the rest burn like foul incense as he exhales a slow cloud of blue-white. It floats above his head and slowly drifts, with the rest of the twining grey, until it fills even the hidden crevices John has yet to discover. 

(There’s a past in those corners, a history measured in blown grams and blown veins and blown irises. John knows it’s all there, even though he’s seen no evidence, in the same way he can see past the blank expressions to hurt or ecstasy or frustration. It’s a sixth sense that he treasures at the same time that it terrifies him.) 

John wants to open a window, but it’s biting cold out and the wind is kicking up the grime of the city with its fierce howl. It batters against the buildings like an invasion, and there’s no way he’s going to let all those bits of London in, too. Instead he permits his eyes to water and tries not to feel like he’s in some seedy, strange back alley pub.

“It bothers you,” Sherlock says, his body redolent, his muscles boredom-weak as though six caseless days have caused atrophy of more than just his brain. 

He pulls out a new one, holding it loosely between his fingers as his mouth tightens around the end. The lighter ignites with a short click, and the tip glows red for a moment, brightens as Sherlock inhales a steady, focused stream. 

“No, it’s fine,” John says, though it really isn’t. 

John’s not currently a smoker, hasn’t been since he was fourteen and would sneak cigarettes from Harry’s and his father’s packets to share with George and Janie from down the street. He stopped after the twins had moved to Cardiff for their mother’s new job; it was the camaraderie and defiance he’d craved, not the nicotine. 

It was the same reason he’d let Harry sneak him into bars when he was seventeen, and would sip on a single pint as she’d work her way through elaborately concocted drinks and difficult to pronounce bottles of blood red and golden yellow wine. They wouldn’t speak to one another for much of the night; Harry would carouse and flirt and drink from the glasses that were bought for her while John watched whatever match was on the telly, and he’d watch Harry, too – her appointed sentinel, though she never once brought it up.

Later, they would stumble home (Harry because she was drunk, John because his sister would cling so strongly to him). Sometimes, she would sing and laugh and tease him affectionately. He would laugh with her, happy to be included in her joy, however temporary. Other times, she would cry, and he would help her up the stairs and tuck her into bed and kiss her forehead. He never told her that it would be alright, because she’d never said what was wrong, but he was happy then, too. Happy to be important enough to see the tears she’d keep hidden from everyone else.

Sherlock doesn’t cry, except when he’s manipulating someone (he’s brilliant at it, and even though John knows it’s an act, he has to suppress the instinct to pull Sherlock close and kiss his forehead). No, he doesn’t cry. He shoots walls instead, or screams at the world, at death and incompetence and humanity, at murderers and good Samaritans alike. But he also laughs, really laughs, in a way that had shocked John to trembling somewhere deep inside the first few times he’d heard it. It is such a natural sound, so honest and carefree, that John still can’t stop the bubblingly light feeling of delight that inevitably overcomes him.

No one sees Sherlock laugh like that. It’s like being privy to the most clandestine secret in the world.

Right before he’d initially deployed, he’d spent the weekend with Harry. Clara had gone to Leeds for some sort of business endeavor (meetings, conferences, symposiums – her perpetual escape during that autumn blurs together in his memory), and John had accompanied his sister as she poured herself drink after drink. Moscato and thick-as-nectar ice wines, merlot and a port so deep garnet it was almost black, cocktails with whiskey, and with rum, and with gin. She would swirl the wine in the glass, or mix the cocktails in a shaker, and take one sip. Then she would dump the rest of it down the kitchen sink.

She had been drunk before noon.

“I’m trying,” she’d said, eyes wide and watery. “I’m really trying.”

When he’d been invalided home, Clara was gone and all the empty bottles he’d left behind when he’d departed had been replaced twofold. And she’d savored the whole of each beverage, finishing off a bottle of Pinot Noir as she’d handed him her mobile and said, “Take it. Please take it.”

There’s an explosion on the telly, a fake one in some program that is, apparently, about explosions and also possibly the government, but John can barely see the screen for all of the smoke. The light is on in the kitchen, and the white and grey clouds rise eagerly and moth-like to meet it. It seems to crowd there, illuminated and rolling flat and sloped as a desert.

He doesn’t ask what Sherlock’s doing, because it isn’t one of the right questions. He knows why Sherlock burns money in the form of sharp smelling tobacco, and it’s not worth bothering over right now. He’s learned to flip a switch on Doctor Watson and just go with it, with the body parts on the kitchen counters and the nicotine patch overdoses and lack of proper eating or sleeping. This is no different, really.

Still, he wants to know things like “Why now?” and “How long will this last before you start smoking in earnest or quit altogether?” There’s no precedent for Sherlock’s very human proclivities; John can only predict the patterns of the more bizarre habits.

On every other Tuesday, for example, Sherlock will carve out an hour to visit Bart’s, to haunt its halls. Sometimes it’s Molly and the morgue for body parts, and sometimes it’s Mike Stamford, and once it was the computer system to find out John’s marks and deduce what sort of student he was based solely on a candid photograph in a newsletter that had graced some long forgotten bulletin board for a week.

John will know, instinctively, what Sherlock will do at Bart’s on any given visit without asking. He isn’t sure how he figures it out, but he does. Perhaps it’s the combined instincts of soldier, doctor, codependent swirling together to form a particularly niche ability. Sherlock reads others like a book – John reads Sherlock like a map.

“Do you intend to observe me all night, or is this just a passing fascination?”

John blinks and shakes his head slightly, clearing it of various sepia ghosts. Sherlock has moved to sit up on the sofa, another new cigarette grasped tightly in his hand. His hair is pressed down in odd angles at the back, and is tug-frizzed at the sides and front. John opens his mouth to speak.

“What do you see, John?”

“Well. You need to clear out that ashtray, for one.”

Sherlock stands and sweeps his dressing gown behind him with a dramatic flick. It billows back to sway delicately silken around his pyjama-clad calves. 

He says again, almost frantically, “What do you _see_?”

John looks and sees a man, as human as any other underneath his tightly clutched security blanket diagnoses. A man who won’t say out loud that he’s trying, really trying but who’s doing it all the same, and desperately broadcasting that to John in the best way he knows how. John sees a man who wants to open himself up to someone, but doesn’t know where to make the incision. And it’s depressing and so blindingly brilliant at the same time.

“Right,” Sherlock says, voice muffled by the cigarette that now rests between his lips.

John almost misses the word entirely for all its hushed tones, and though he hadn’t spoken aloud, he’s sure his own conclusions were somehow written across his face; in the crease of his brow, the quirk of his mouth, the sharpness of his eyes.

Sherlock rests the burning cigarette atop the growing mound. It teeters for a moment before finding its balance again, lit end tilted up like flower to sun, and he falls back against the sofa. His ankles rest on the arm and one hand dangles near the ashtray, as though he might pick the cigarette up again.

“Hmm,” John says. He stands and clicks off the telly. “I’m going to bed. Don’t burn down the flat.”

He’s granted a half smile for his words, but it’s genuine and fond and inclusive, and John falls asleep happy that night, still tasting smoke.


End file.
